Overview/Features

A PCI card which supports DVB-S and DVB-S2 standard definition and high definition digital
satellite TV. A common interface unit with a dummy PCI connector and standard faceplate is included (Tip: if the dummy PCI connector were trimmed by a few millimetres it would presumably fit in a PCI express slot too). The hardware supports rotors via DiSEqC 1.2, and the card has a 4-pin molex power connector, ostensibly to draw additional power from the PSU rather than load the PCI bus. A remote control and an infrared receiver cable are included.

It uses an ioctl to switch between DVB-S and DVB-S2 modes. An application to do this called 'switch' is supplied. Multiproto is not required.

It was released for kernel 2.6.18, and the Fedora Core 6 distribution, so considerable work would be
needed to port it to the latest kernel. Some preliminary work on this has been reported, and locking
has been reported to be better than the multiproto driver,
see http://linuxtv.org/pipermail/linux-dvb/2008-October/029642.html.

Whilst it is encouraging that Twinhan bothered to put a Linux driver on their website, it is almost
useless to end users. It does not compile with current kernels -- it was not released in the
kernel and did not benefit from the future-proofing that that provides. It also offers no open-source
CI support. If Twinhan would like to cooperate with the whole community to develop first-class
future-proof open-source support for this card in the form of a released in-kernel Linux
driver it would greatly benefit them and their customers.

Mantis/Multiproto Driver

It has been reported that (reference?) the Technisat will not be recognised as a frontend unless the value of the MANTIS_VP_1041_DVB_S2 #define in mantis_vp1041.h is changed from 0x0031 to 0x0001 to suit the different subsystem ID. Even with this change the card currently will not tune unless placed in DVB-S2 mode first using szap, even if the channel you want is DVB-S
(Can someone please recheck this and report, stating driver version etc?).

UPDATE 24 Feb 2008: The mantis tree has been updated to support the subsystem IDs of the SkyStar HD2, manual changes to the tree are no longer needed to get the card recognised at boot time. It now tunes successfully to both DVB-S and DVB-S2 transponders using the replacement szap.c described below. It is not necessary to use the multiproto tree as described above, use "hg clone http://jusst.de/hg/mantis", no patches are required. It is unclear whether DiSEqC switches and rotors are being driven correctly and/or with sufficient current http://www.linuxtv.org/pipermail/linux-dvb/2008-February/024060.html.